ng, they would be most
deserving of condemnation. But if they stirred up this sedition because
there were no other means than that, of averting the total ruin of their
subjects and of strengthening on new foundations, and for several
centuries, the happiness of nations, one must needs lament the unfortunate
necessity (see above, pp. 146, 147, what has been said of the force of[201]
necessity) to which they were reduced, and praise them for the use that
they made thereof.'

This maxim, with divers others set forth here, is not applicable to the
government of God. Not to mention the fact that it is only the disorders of
a very small part of his kingdom which are brought up in objection, it is
untrue that he has no anxiety about evils, that he desires them, that he
brings them into being, to have the glory of allaying them. God wills order
and good; but it happens sometimes that what is disorder in the part is
order in the whole. I have already stated this legal axiom: _Incivile est
nisi tota lege inspecta judicare_. The permission of evils comes from a
kind of moral necessity: God is constrained to this by his wisdom and by
his goodness; _this necessity is happy_, whereas that of the prince spoken
of in the maxim is _unhappy_. His State is one of the most corrupt; and the
government of God is the best State possible.

129. XIV. 'The permission of a certain evil is only excusable when one
cannot remedy it without introducing a greater evil; but it cannot be
excusable in those who have in hand a remedy more efficacious against this
evil, and against all the other evils that could spring from the
suppression of this one.'

The maxim is true, but it cannot be brought forward against the government
of God. Supreme reason constrains him to permit the evil. If God chose what
would not be the best absolutely and in all, that would be a greater evil
than all the individual evils which he could prevent by this means. This
wrong choice would destroy his wisdom and his goodness.

130. XV. 'The Being infinitely powerful, Creator of matter and of spirits,
makes whatever he wills of this matter and these spirits. There is no
situation or shape that he cannot communicate to spirits. If he then
permitted a physical or a moral evil, this would not be for the reason that
otherwise some other still greater physical or moral evil would be
altogether inevitable. None of those reasons for the mixture of good and
evil which are founded on the